People are talking, but are you listening?
Today I got up and read this article from Colorlines by Akiba Solomon, and her complaints hit on what I've been talking about over here for a while. The whole thing is a great read, but I want to quote part and riff off of it:
Black women have been defining ourselves since before Sojourner Truth made her infamous 1851 "Ain't I a Woman" speech. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, black women tell, no scream, about our humanity, complexity, legacy, pride, sisterhood, spirituality, money problems, romantic desires, bone-deep sadness, moral conflicts, sexuality and joy. Some of us are dying for a "Sunday Kind of Love." Some of us think we're cute and "Cleva." Some of us aren't that damn deep. The problem isn't that black women haven't defined ourselves for ourselves. It's that mainstream media DON'T LISTEN.
And that's the problem for all minority groups. It isn't that people aren't talking about how oppression works. It's that the people who still actively oppress others don't listen to anyone. The real problem with black women isn't a white male-dominated media marginalizing black women's voices into a stereotyped view of a whole race. NO! The real problem is, black women just aren't talking enough to define themselves.
This same type of dismissive technique is used on women in general, on blacks in general, and on any fringe group that the established white media doesn't want to acknowledge. To give you an idea of how easy it is to marginalize someone in the media, even someone supposedly empowered, during the 2008 elective cycle, Yahoo put any and all references to Hilary Clinton in Queer News. It didn't matter if she was talking to gays or talking about jobs to unions, Hilary was a de facto queer to Yahoo. Obama was more hit or miss, but half of his articles also got flagged as queer, this despite his stated religious intolerance of gay civil rights. Meanwhile, anything said by the GOP, no matter how trivial or petty, was put in Headline news. A white man says it? Damn, must be front page news! A woman said it? Back to the back page with the homos and blacks.
The excuse that minorities aren't writing enough of their own stories doesn't fly either. There's lots of writing online about these issues, but the mainstream media still chooses to present a white-centric view of the world. Any article that attacks or merely questions the white male status quo is not published. And if it isn't vetted by a "real news source" it's even easier for other whites to marginalize the impact of their continued racism. How can there be a racism problem, if it's never mentioned once on the evening news?
The fact is, ANY PRIVILEGED PERSON WHO WANTED TO EDUCATE THEMSELVES COULD, simply by going online to look at the blogs of minority writers. But you don't want to hear how you're still bad people, so you lock out any and all voices of dissent that don't fit in with your personal narrative. You stick with white news sources to make sure everything you read fits in with your view of the world. But you're not really racist, just interested in "maintaining personal harmony," or something.
I could turn this around and talk about all the times I've tried to talk to people about being trans, or about the times I addressed the cyclical nature of child abuse without success. But examples specific to me aren't needed to illustrate the scope of this denial problem. The problem is, white people are GREAT at shifting blame from themselves for the commission of a crime (because discrimination is a crime, you know) to their victims for letting it happen. Then you say "Well those people should be more aware. And why aren't they speaking out on this if they really think it's such a problem?" Only, they are speaking out, RIGHT NOW, and you're marginalizing their complaint, at the same time erasing all the similar complaints that came before it. You never personally heard a complaint before now, so using only your anecdotal evidence, there must never have been a problem until the uppity minority decided to make a big deal out of it.
Bam, racism erased. Never happened at all, and it was just the black "misunderstanding." (A backhand slap that implies that blacks are too stupid to know whether they've been prejudiced against or not, and they NEED a white to explain why something is or is not racist.) It's that easy for white people to ignore every minority problem, even if a problem is widespread. Just look at Arizona, being blatantly racist in making law enforcement and education policies, and yet the white people in Arizona seem almost mute about the issues. Why? Because…they're racists. If they weren't, the governor would have been recalled. If they weren't, none of these bills banning books and idea would fly. These policies fly because the white voters of Arizona WANT THIS. To suggest anything else is to make excuses for racism while at the same time continuing to marginalize and erase people.
Black women have been speaking to their problems for a long, long time. Problem is, their articles are dismissed or ignored, while the white writer gets away with making statements like "The problem with black women is, they haven't defined themselves yet." Yes, they have, and so has every minority present on the civil rights battlefield. The only people who don't recognize that are our common enemy, the white privileged people who remain willfully ignorant of how they help perpetuate oppression.
Black women have defined themselves, but it's up to white people to actually read what black women have to say and stop pretending there's no discussion on this topic. There's plenty of discussion. You're just tuning it out because you don't like the message they're sending. But whose fault is that? Theirs, for spitting truths in your face, or yours for being incapable of listening to the truth?
